American Fire

by Monica Hesse

  One night in 2011 he went to a local bar called Shuckers. He was carrying two eight balls of cocaine, though he still didn’t know what he intended to do with them. Maybe he would ration out the contents and get high. Maybe he’d overdose. Devastated by the thought of losing his mother, he’d already put a gun to his head once, but found he couldn’t pull the trigger.

  There was a woman he’d noticed at Shuckers, she was often there when he was, but he was never able to gather more than three words to say to her. He knew he wasn’t her only admirer. She was too pretty, she danced too well, and he was certain that opening his mouth would immediately be followed by sticking his foot in it, so he’d decided to keep quiet in her presence. But that night, the night with the eight ball and the self-pity and the confused heart, she happened to talk to him. And his world would briefly turn sparkly and perfect in a way he had heretofore never dreamed, because this is the night he would meet Tonya, who would be the love of his life.

  CHAPTER 5

  MONOMANIE INCENDIAIRE

  ARSON IS A WEIRD CRIME.

  It doesn’t make its perpetrators any richer, unless it’s an insurance-related plot. It’s not like stealing; it doesn’t result in nicer things. It doesn’t, to simplify murder to its most basic element, get rid of someone you hate. It doesn’t even usually make people famous: researchers have assessed that less than 20 percent of arsons lead to an arrest. Another way of looking at this percentage is to infer that any research employed on arsonists is employed on the unlucky ones. The skilled, careful, or otherwise lucky arsonists are never caught. It’s a crime in which the weapon is nature, and the end result is the destruction of a thing, the changing of a landscape, the carving of a charred signature onto a dead piece of earth. Ultimately, the visible remnants of an arson are not what it has left behind but what it has taken away.

  It’s also a property crime, inherently less compelling than crimes against living things. An arsonist might not even make the news cycle, unless someone is injured in the fire. Serial killer David Berkowitz was an arsonist. People forget that, because the fires were overshadowed by his more heinous crimes of murdering New Yorkers under the moniker “Son of Sam” in the 1970s. But he lit fourteen hundred fires, according to a log book he kept of his activities, and it was one of these fires that ultimately led to his arrest: after he started a blaze outside of his neighbor’s door, the neighbor suggested police investigate Berkowitz, who he thought behaved oddly.

  The Boston Belfry Murderer was an arsonist, too. Thomas Piper, who assaulted and killed four young women in 1870s Boston—and who, after a witness spotted him in a long black opera cloak, caused the men of the city to abandon wearing the popular clothing item altogether—later admitted that he would set fires as a means of relieving tension when he wasn’t attacking girls.

  It is not a new crime. There are references to arson in the Bible, like King Absalom instructing his men to burn Joab’s fields. There might have been arsonists living in caves—patient arsonists using flint rocks and small twigs, because the invention of maliciously setting fires first required the invention of mastering fire, making arson an unlikely signpost of humanity’s evolution.

  But the way we think of arson is new. The way arsonists have been perceived and studied is continually evolving. German scientists were the first to study it, beginning in the late 1700s. They believed, based on anecdotal evidence and prurient wishful thinking, that fires were set predominantly by young peasant women. The suspected cause was puberty—the trauma of menstruation, a sexual development gone awry. Fire starting was an illness of tragic, hysterical, impoverished women who lacked coping skills and were victims of the unpredictability of female biology. The Morbid Anatomy of the Brain, a medical textbook from 1815, describes one case study as such:

  “A servant girl in the country, happy in her situation and liked by her master and mistress, one day while making a toast for the tea was overcome with the propensity to set fire to the barnyard—instantly went out and committed the act, for which she was hanged.”

  Any underlying causes to this “sudden propensity” are not explored. Was the servant girl truly “happy in her situation,” or only according to her master and mistress? Was she “liked” by her master—or was she harassed by him, or abused by him, or any number of other possibilities that were not explored by the textbook author?

  In later years, the German researchers’ conclusions would be proven to have no scientific basis—in every other study, the vast majority of arsonists have been men. Most of those men reflect the racial demographics of the area they live in: a predominantly black neighborhood would be more likely to have a black arsonist, a white neighborhood would have a white arsonist, and so on. A majority of arsonists have IQs below the range considered normal. A disproportionately high percentage of them struggle with substance abuse or have been diagnosed with schizophrenia; a disproportionately high percentage of them are adolescents or young adults.

  Research on female arsonists is incomplete at best, though the research that does exist suggests that female fire setters are more likely than males to do so with a revenge motive in mind, and more likely to set fire to buildings with emotional meaning rather than to random structures. Ugandan spiritual leader Credonia Mwerinde once set fire to the possessions of a man who had spurned her, and then later instructed some of her followers to burn down the home of a man who had refused to join her cult, and then later, after her predictions about the end of the world did not come to pass in 2000, brought six hundred members of her cult into a church filled with gas cans, locked them in, and left them to perish in a fire. (There are disputes as to whether she actually lit the match in that instance.) In some studies, the percentage of female arsonists was as high as 35 percent, in others, women were as low as 4 percent, but they do not appear as the majority in any recent study.

  In time, scientists began realizing that all women got periods, not just peasants and not just arsonists, and so perhaps a better explanation was needed to explain arson. Sigmund Freud suggested, as he was prone to do, that people who set fires did so for reasons related to phalluses. Flames themselves were reminiscent in shape and movement to penises, Freud argued, and thus attraction to them could represent homosexual impulses in men and heterosexual impulses in women. Of course, the same attraction could be used to describe not only arsonists but also aspiring firefighters: “It is as if primitive man had the impulse, when he came into contact with fire, to gratify an infantile pleasure with respect to it and put it out with a stream of urination,” he wrote in a 1930 essay. “Putting a fire out by urination represented a sexual act in man.”

  Aside from the German and Freudian research, a French scientist named Charles Chrétian Henri Marc contributed his own thoughts to the field in the mid-1830s. A compulsive setting of fires was, he decided, merely a problem of impulse control. At the time of his research, there was a subset of crimes that fell under the umbrella category of “monomania.” Crimes under this umbrella term were, Marc described, “against nature, so monstrous and without reason as to be explicable only through insanity, yet perpetrated by subjects apparently in full possession of sanity.”

  Arson, he decided, deserved to be a special subset of these illnesses. He first called it monomanie incendiaire, and then, a term familiar even to twenty-first-century readers, “pyromania.”

  Americans were not sure at first how they felt about pyromania as a psychiatric illness. The term crossed the pond around the same time as the assassination of President James Garfield in 1881. The assailant had been a delusional man who believed he was responsible for Garfield’s presidential victory and owed a Cabinet post. America was uneasy with the idea that criminals could use mental illness as an excuse for bad behavior, as psychiatrist Jeffrey Geller chronicles in a history of American fire setting. In the late nineteenth century, the thinking was that things ought to be black and white. Either someone shot the president, or he didn’t. Either someone lit a fire, or he didn’t.
The reason why shouldn’t matter.

  But current researchers realize there are lots of fathomable, logical reasons people light fires, even if that logic is sometimes profoundly twisted. The Center for Arson Research, run by a psychologist named Dian Williams, has divided fire setters into categories. Experimental fire setters, usually children, who light fires once and then never do it again. Thought-disordered fire setters, whose arson is a symptom of greater mental illness—the kind of arsonist who might believe, for example, that his fires are a message from a voice only he can hear. Communicative fire setters, who use their fire to convey a message they find themselves unable to otherwise convey. (Jeffrey Geller writes about one such patient—a forty-three-year-old woman who’d spent her adult life at a mental hospital after trying to burn down her family’s house as a teenager. Whenever she grew unhappy with her living situation and wanted to be moved, she lit another fire.)

  It’s not unheard of—in fact, it’s practically become a trope—for firefighters to become arsonists in an attempt to become heroes, lighting fires and then racing to the scene to put them out. Williams puts these arsonists in the “thrill-seeking” category. The most famous American arsonist, John Leonard Orr, was a thrill-seeking arsonist. His day job was a fire captain and investigator for the Glendale Fire Department in California. On his own time, he lit hundreds of fires, one of which killed four people. He even wrote a novel called Points of Origin, about a serial arsonist in Southern California. Points of Origin, he swore after he was caught, proved nothing about his own acts. Those who were obsessed with the Orr case could not help but notice, however, that the protagonist’s name, Aaron Stiles, could be arranged into a particular anagram: “I set L.A. arsons.”

  The people in the preceding examples were all arsonists, but some of them might not necessarily have been pyromaniacs, at least not by the modern definition. “Pyromania” is an overused term. A group of psychiatrists in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law once explained it this way: “Firesetting is a behavior. Arson is a crime. Pyromania is a psychiatric diagnosis.”

  “Arson” does not exist in the American Psychological Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. But pyromania does. It is the only subset of fire setting that is explicitly included in the DSM. It is defined as “experiencing tension or affective arousal before setting a fire, and feelings of pleasure, gratification, or relief during or after fire-starting.”

  A pyromaniac does not light just one fire, like an experimental fire setter; a true pyromaniac will light several. He does not do them because he is drunk or psychotic or because he believes he is being instructed to light fires by a voice or a god or devil or monster, like a thought-disordered fire setter. He does not do them because he wants to be a hero, like some firefighter arsonists, nor for the practical reason of gaining insurance money, or covering up the evidence of a different crime.

  For a true pyromaniac, the fire itself is the motive. An act that becomes its own purifying absolution, its own reason for being. He lights fires because something about lighting fires gives him a sense of release. A pyromaniac is like Thomas Sweatt, a Washington, D.C., fast-food manager and arsonist. His first fire, in 1985, had a perverse logic to it: he wanted so badly to again see a man he had found attractive that he decided the best way to do it was to burn down the man’s house, which he did by following him home one night and pouring two liters of gasoline underneath the front door. The man’s wife died and his two daughters were injured. But Sweatt, as he watched the scene from a distance, was pleased to see the object of his affection appear on the street wearing only his underwear. He discovered such a feeling of pleasure and release from the experience that he went on to light an approximated three hundred more fires, several of them fatal. When he was eventually caught in 2005, he received a life sentence.

  To talk about arson is to talk about buildings burning down. To talk about the term “pyromania” is really to talk about the unfathomable mysteries of the human brain and the human heart: Why do we do things? Why do we want things? What moves us, and stirs us, and why are some people moved by the things that the rest of us find inexplicable or abhorrent?

  Some arsonists go into treatment and are cured, though those are often the arsonists whose fire setting was a by-product of another mental illness. Some arsonists take well to the therapy, pronounce themselves cured, and then leave treatment and immediately burn down another house. No one really knows why. Because, despite all of the research and studying that scientists have put into understanding arsonists over the years, there’s a piece of the puzzle that remains inexplicable:

  Some people light things on fire because they feel like they have to.

  CHAPTER 6

  TONYA

  EVE WITH THE APPLE, IN THE GARDEN. Hester Prynne with a scarlet A.

  Later, after all this, people would have stories about Tonya Bundick. They would conflate vague memories with speculations and folklore, and they would decide Tonya had been a bad girl. Or a sociopath, not deliberately bad but lacking the moral compass most people had. Or that she had sorceresslike powers over men. They would make her into what they each needed her to be in order to make sense of everything that happened, and they would peel and peel away at her, never knowing if they were to the center.

  People who didn’t know Tonya at all knew her family name. Bundick was a Born Here name, a good one, with roots tracing back to Richard Bundick, a colonist who had arrived in 1647, farmed hundreds of acres, and died with enough land and tobacco to make his wife and children comfortable for the rest of their lives. Now, Bundicks were everywhere; the name appeared on law offices, HVAC companies, government IDs.

  People who knew her in person knew her mostly from school functions—she was a single mom with two sons—or from the bar Shuckers. Tonya, forty, was very pretty, with a fine-boned face and big blue eyes that had the flat, bored look of an Egyptian statue. She tanned all the time. She was so tan she was orange, and people would see her at multiple tanning salons in a single day, switching locations when she hit the maximum allowed time. Her legs were shapely, and at the bar she wore clothes to show them off. On at least one night (As a joke? A costume?) she went to the bar wearing a magenta lingerie set—bra, panties, garter belt—and nothing else.

  In the context of Shuckers, which in 2012 was at the height of its popularity, this was less of a shocking sartorial choice than it might have been elsewhere. One of the bar’s frequent attendees, a woman named Terri, described the place as “sort of like Studio 54,” if the famous New York nightclub was located in rural Virginia, with a parking lot full of pickup trucks and a clientele that occasionally broke out in brawls. (Another Shucker’s patron noted that he mostly tried to stay away because of the fights. But that if he was in the mood to see a fight, as one was from time to time, then Shuckers was the perfect place to go.)

  Anyway, the Studio 54 comparison was really about social hierarchy: a place with a definitive sense of who was in and who was out. There were some female customers who danced on the bar or on the stage at Shuckers to show off, and some women who watched them. Terri had been one of the watchers until one day she was told by one of the dancers that she should come dance on the stage, too. The woman who told her that was Tonya Bundick.

  To Terri, who was a little older than a lot of the twenty- and thirtysomething clientele, and who hadn’t been out of the house much recently due to a chronic illness, Tonya telling her to get on the stage to dance made her feel as though she’d been embraced by the cool kids at the lunch table.

  Tonya was fun, and always seemed to have a lot of people paying attention to her. If the clothes she wore were provocative, no one could deny she had the body for them. She’d even inspired her own fashion following. One Accomack resident remembered seeing Tonya “peacocking” around the bar in a tube top befitting, in size and design, a Barbie doll. Trailing behind her was a cluster of other women, similarly tube-topped, but none of them wi
th quite the figure or presence to pull off the ensemble. The parade reminded the onlooker of the movie Multiplicity, where the main character makes a series of clones, which become more defective with every copy. Tonya wasn’t ever catty about it, though. She was the type of person to seem genuinely happy when she received compliments from other women, and happy to return them as well, offering fashion or makeup advice. She made an impact. A former Shucker’s employee remembered Tonya as the kind of woman who “never bought her own drinks or had to bring her own money.” Another Shucker’s regular was a bit more circumspect. “One of those girls who if you just look at her, you assume she’s trashy,” the regular said. “But she actually seemed shy. People were just quick to judge her.”

  One of the remarkable things about Tonya’s popularity was the fact that she had become popular at all. Growing up just north of Parksley, she’d been a bit of an outcast. Her eyeglasses were huge and round. She was bullied, especially on the school bus. She rode the bus several times a day: Arcadia, the high school she attended, had a lot of vocational tech programs in the early 1990s: Future Farmers of America, or Future Mechanics. Tonya, along with a small group of other girls, was a member of the Health Occupations Student Association, a group of students who took regular school classes in the morning and then got on a bus in the afternoon to take classes in home health care, allowing them to graduate as certified nursing assistants.

  The kids in that program were smart, recalled one student who went through it with Tonya, but moreover, they were practical and realistic about their future options. Their families didn’t have the money to pay for college. These students expected to graduate high school and then immediately go to work, so they spent their teenage years learning to turn patients to prevent bedsores, or lift heavy objects without lower back strain. It was a pathway for girls to get the kind of work that would be useful in Accomack, a place with an aging population where the demand for home health aides was regularly listed as a “growth occupation” in the Virginia Employment Commission’s annual report. It was that way across the United States.